‘Are we being responsible?’ Padma asked me on the first day of our journey through France and Spain. I thought for a long time and tried to spin it so that I could justify our travels during a global pandemic. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Responsible people would stay home.’

But like tens of thousands of other Europeans we were on the road for summer holidays. Non-essential travel. But does a global pandemic really mean we can’t have some vestiges of our former lives? Before leaving we consulted many friends who strongly encouraged us to stick to our plans. ‘Just be careful and avoid groups,’ they’d tell us.

And that’s what we did.

We practiced coronavirus protection to the extreme. And so did the Asturians where we spent most of our time. Padma and I forgot our masks when we entered our hotel dining area and got strongly reprimanded. We tried to enter a gift shop in Gijon and got a flat out ‘STOP’ and were directed to the disinfectant. We hiked in mountains wearing masks along with everyone else. One night we sat down at an al fresco table at a restaurant and then noticed some loud, heavily drinking young people at next table. We bailed and went to a market and bought some Asturian cheese and La Rioja wine and ate in our room. Like the Asturians, we respected the severity of the virus, studied the science behind the virus transmission and were not complacent.

And in the end we were not COVID positive. The day before we left Spain, Germany placed a blanket restriction on the country as some areas like Madrid were pushing the national cases per 100,000 people threshold well over the limit. So that meant we had to quarantine until we received a negative COVID result. Instead of a 2-3 week slow journey home we took the two-day direct route. We skirted Paris and picked up two hitchhikers. Joseph and Mary were en route to Finland to visit friends so we gave them a lift to Germany. Just after crossing the border we pulled off on an autobahn rest area and got our COVID tests. ‘You’ll get the results in 2-3 days,’ the official said as he jotted down our details with pen on paper and handed us a sheet with QR codes.

We scanned the QR codes into our Corona-Warn app and checked pretty much every five minutes for six days. It was stressful but we were happy to oblige and be responsible. We were fairly confident we hadn’t contracted the virus but Germany seemed to be terrified of travellers returning from Spain. We needed a negative result before we could emerge from quarantine. On Saturday we found four letters awaiting us. Our test results … sent by snail mail. The free COVID tests for returning travellers in August were just too much for the antiquated German reliance on hard copies. We are still waiting for our high tech Corona-Warn app to go ‘bing’ to inform us of the arrival of our test results. As we enjoyed our ‘out of quarantine’ status today we were grateful for once for snail mail.